Reinventing College Parties with Daybreaker Campus

This is an environment in which students can have fun and relax without risking the anxiety, depression, and relationship problems that often result from alcohol-related incidents.

The “morning movement” Daybreaker has hosted sober sunrise parties for years, and now they’re bringing them to young people — stressed out students, specifically — in a bid to reduce alcohol-related incidents and provide relief.

The Daybreaker Campus experience, which includes an hour-long yoga and fitness session followed by a two-hour, alcohol-free dance party with DJs, live music performances and a speaker series with a roster of NASA astronauts, CEOs and entrepreneurs, takes places in the mornings, hence the name—but can it make a lasting impact when nights, weekends, and keg parties come along?

Unless you’re ahead of the game and started your drinking career in high school or even middle school, college is the ultimate mecca for binge drinking and partying.

It’s wonderful to imagine getting a friendly hug at the door instead of a mean-mug from a bouncer, but could introducing this idea of partying without intoxication really create an entirely new framework in which young people would see socializing without the need for alcohol or drugs?

Daybreaker was born out of a frustration over nightlife and a desire to bring community back in an authentic, positive way, explains CEO and Co-Founder Radha Agrawal. She points to a statistic reported by the American Psychological Association that shows the main concerns among college students are anxiety, depression and relationship problems largely due to alcohol-related incidents. In fact, the demand for psychological services at the University of Central Florida — one of the country’s largest universities with roughly 60,000 students — grew so rapidly, they began converting supply closets into therapists’ offices. Pair this with a typical coping mechanism of weekend binge drinking and a lack of genuine social connection, she says, and the anxiety loop is only exacerbated.

“Eli and I have several friends and family who have been struggling with drug and alcohol abuse who are in college now on campuses where everyone is on their cellphones and the only outlet is a drunken frat party,” Agrawal says.

But if a student is prone to alcoholism or addiction, could an outlet like this really stop that person from going down that path of trying drugs or alcohol and becoming addicted, if it is a genetic disease? Agrawal says, “Absolutely.”